What do you think of Chris Crawford's work on Interactive Storytelling? His latest iteration is "Siboot" http://siboot.org/
Note: He mentions being inspired for that from discussions with you at Atari.
Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
231–240 of 931 posts
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#232When you were envisioning today's computers in the 70s you seemed to have been focused mostly on the educational benefits but it turns out that these devices are even better for entertainment to the point were they are dangerously addictive and steal time away from education. Do you have any thoughts on interfaces that guide the brain away from its worst impulses and towards more productive uses?
We were mostly thinking of "human advancement" or as Engelbart's group termed it "Human Augmentation" -- this includes education along with lots of other things. I remember noting that if Moore's Law were to go a decade beyond 1995 (Moore's original extrapolation) that things like television and other "legal drugs" would be possible. We already had a very good sense of this before TV things were possible from noting…
I guess in the use of technology one faces a process rather similar to natural selection, in which the better the user's ability to restrict his use to what he has to do, the more likely the survival, i.e. the user will not procrastinate and get distracted. The use of computers for entertainment is unstoppable, it's nearly impossible to not allow the kids find and play those games, chat with friends on WhatsApp, and be exploited otherwise by companies that make money from that sort of exploitation, even though that's at the cost of their psychological health and future success. People spend every single second of the day connected and distracted, and this seems irreversible. I wonder if you have any practical thought on how this can be remedied.
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#233Hi Alan, Previously you've mentioned the "Oxbridge approach" to reading, whereby--if my recollection is correct--you take four topics and delve into them as much as possible. Could you elaborate on this approach (I've searched the internet, couldn't find anything)? And do you think this structured approach has more benefits than, say, a non-structured approach of reading whatever of interest? Thanks for your time and…
There are more than 23,000,000 books in the Library of Congress, and a good reader might be able to read 23,000 books in a lifetime (I know just a few people who have read more). So we are contemplating a lifetime of reading in which we might touch 1/10th of 1% of the extent books. We would hope that most of the ones we aren't able to touch are not useful or good or etc.
So I think we have to put something more than randomness and following links to use here. (You can spend a lot of time learning about a big system like Linux without hitting many of the most important ideas in computing -- so we have to heed the "Art is long and Life is short" idea.
Part of the "Oxbridge" process is to have a "reader" (a person who helps you choose what to look at), and these people are worth their weight in gold ...
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#234As a community, we often think on quite short time-scales ("What can we build right now, for users right now, to make money asap?"). I feel like you've always been good at stepping back, and taking a longer view. So what should a designer or a developer be doing now, to make things better in 10 years, or 100 years?
What does the world actually need?
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#235Hi Alan, What advice would you give to those who don't have a HARC to call their own? what would you do to get set up/a community/funding for your adventure if you were starting out today? What advice do you have for those who are currently in an industrial/academic institution who seek the true intellectual freedom you have found? Is it just luck?!
I don't have great advice (I found getting halfway decent funding since 1980 to be quite a chore). I was incredibly lucky to wind up quite accidentally at the U of Utah ARPA project 50 year ago this year. Part of the deal is being really stubborn about what you want to do -- for example, I've never tried to make money from my ideas (because then you are in a very different kind of process -- and this process is not a…
Thanks.
Do you have any advice about community building, especially around fostering new and big ideas?
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#236Hi Alan,
We know you are not a big fan of web. Regardless how we got here, what is your view on how we should address the real world decentralization problems in the context of http://www.decentralizedweb.net/ ?
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#237Hi Alan, are you envisioning a way to participate/connect-to YC Research as an independent researcher? I don't mean as an associate since many of us have the daily focus in startups but as a place where our ideas and code would be better nurtured.
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#238At my office a lot of the non-programmers (marketers, finance people, customer support, etc) write a fair bit of SQL. I've often wondered what it is about SQL that allows them to get over their fear of programming, since they would never drop into ruby or a "real" programming language. Things I've considered: * Graphical programming environment (they run the queries from pgadmin, or Postico, or some app like that) *…
As someone pretty close to this camp, it comes down to your last bullet point - needing to do it, in my opinion. A smaller subset of those people will also learn VBA for the same reason-it helps them get their job done. The benefit those two have is that they are either built in to the tools already (VBA), or a DBA does most of the set up and the used mostly just runs queries against it and doesn't have to worry too much about indexing, performance, schemas, etc (SQL). If I were to try to turn them onto python, it'd be an effort to get it installed and then get them to use the commandline.
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think I'd ask "What programming language design would help us think a lot better than we do now (we are currently terrible!) Certainly, in this day and age, the lack of safe meta-definition is pretty much shocking.
Could you give an example of what you mean by "safe meta-definition"? I'd like to understand this better.
"Meta is dangerous" so a safe meta-language within a language will have "fences" to protect.
(Note that "assignment" to a variable is "meta" in a functional language (and you might want to use a "roll back 'worlds' mechanism" (like transactions) for safety when this is needed.)
This is a parallel to various kinds of optimization (many of which violate module boundaries in some way) -- there are ways to make this a lot safer (most languages don't help much)
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#240At my office a lot of the non-programmers (marketers, finance people, customer support, etc) write a fair bit of SQL. I've often wondered what it is about SQL that allows them to get over their fear of programming, since they would never drop into ruby or a "real" programming language. Things I've considered: * Graphical programming environment (they run the queries from pgadmin, or Postico, or some app like that) *…
SQL is declarative. Compare:
for user in table_users:
if user.is_active:
return user.first_name;
SELECT first_name FROM users_table
WHERE is_active